That night, Preston treated 10 of us to dinner. Everyone raised their glasses. They were toasting me.
I wish I could tell you a fairy-tale ending to this story. But it didn’t go that way. After several months of us working together, the financier decided Preston wasn’t a big enough name to carry the film, and Famke Janssen (X-Men) stepped into the part.
I packed my bags for Rhode Island, where we’d be shooting, but first I stopped in Darnestown to see my parents for a few days. The days turned into a week, then two, without a flight itinerary from Wyman or so much as a return call. Meanwhile, the cast and crew were calling me, asking what was going on. Wyman had vanished. After three weeks of anguish, I knew it was over.
Weeks later, I was at Patty Jenkins’ wedding in L.A., when I ran into Wyman. He apologized, said he wasn’t able to get the funds and wished me well. And that was that.
I returned to my little bungalow under the Hollywood sign. I felt as if I’d been swept up in a tornado and dropped right back where I started. I didn’t know what to do next. All I could think about was the movie and the problems in my life it was supposed to solve.
The best thing to come out of the movie debacle was my friendship with Jenkins. A few weeks after her wedding, she pressured me to be her plus-one at an industry cocktail party. I could barely dress myself that night. I cried in the car and fended off a panic attack as I tried to put on my game face.
Once inside, Jenkins introduced me to Tatiana Kelly, a producer who had made a film called Wristcutters: A Love Story and produced The Hills for MTV. “You’ve both been through hell,” Jenkins said. “Discuss!” And then she walked away.
Kelly and I shared Hollywood war stories. She said she thought my script sounded interesting and she wanted to give it to Laura Rister, who packaged independent films for Untitled Entertainment.
A week later, the three of us met, and Kelly and Rister told me they wanted to help get the movie made. “By the way,” Rister asked, “what’s your connection to Montgomery County? Why did you choose to set your story there?”
I told her I’d grown up there.
“No way,” she said. “So did I.”
It turned out we’d grown up a mile apart and graduated from high school the same year. She’d attended Quince Orchard in Gaithersburg; I’d gone to Wootton; Kelly had gone to school in Washington, D.C. That night we toasted “to Maryland girls making a movie!”
While my new partners began submitting the project to talent agencies and potential financiers, I needed to earn a living. I went back to pitching writing assignments, but my apathy was so palpable I landed exactly none. I was so tired I couldn’t seem to bother putting on makeup. Some days I didn’t even get dressed. I was having difficulty sleeping, and started gaining weight.
One afternoon in 2008, a location scout came to the door, asking if he could photograph my Beachwood Canyon house for an Ashton Kutcher movie. When he called later, offering to rent it for twice what I paid, I put my belongings in storage and returned to Maryland for what was supposed to be a few months’ rest.
I laid low for several months, then took a job answering phones at my stepmother’s office. Her colleagues seemed surprised to see me. “Didn’t you write a book?” they asked. I wanted to cry.
Every once in a while, Kelly and Rister would call with updates. I flew to L.A. a few times to meet actors and potential investors. Finally I told Kelly and Rister that I no longer wanted to direct the film. “If it’s meant to be, it will be,” I told them. “I just can’t hold my breath any longer. And I think I’m getting in the way of our success.”
I felt as if a tremendous burden had lifted. I realized that directing had never been my dream.
I took my belongings out of storage, rented an apartment in the Kentlands and tried to figure out what to do with my life. I wanted to start a second novel, but I needed to make a living. Before all the movie madness, I had tried Pilates and loved it. So I found a studio nearby and joined its apprentice program. By the end of the year I was a certified instructor.
Pilates not only strengthened my core, it helped me learn how to focus on the moment. So much of my life had been lived in the what-if, and I was surprised at how peaceful it felt to accept where I was for once. I would practice Pilates daily, then go on a hike. During my years growing up in Montgomery County, I’d always wanted to be elsewhere. Now, hiking at Great Falls or at Sugarloaf Mountain, I was able to appreciate my surroundings as I never had before.
Still, something felt off. Despite being physically active, I couldn’t lose those few extra pounds. I felt tired a lot, began experiencing frequent headaches and stopped menstruating. My doctor suggested I might be going into early menopause—at 37.
My blood work eventually ruled that out, but it also revealed a level of the hormone prolactin 10 times what it should have been. I went to an endocrinologist who ordered an MRI. A few weeks later, in May 2010, the MRI revealed a tumor on my pituitary gland.
I felt terrified and terribly alone as I lay on the MRI table. Everything I had thought mattered suddenly didn’t. And everything that did matter was threatened.
Several weeks later, further tests revealed that the tumor was a microprolactinoma, which is benign. The doctor would treat it with medication, hoping to shrink it and avoid the need for surgery. Because of its proximity to the optic nerve, I could become blind if the tumor grew too large. So the doctor would monitor it monthly, and we’d re-evaluate it in a year.
At home, I searched the Internet for everything I could find about my condition. I learned that the primary cause of a prolactinoma is stress. When the adrenal glands send out excess stress signals to the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland grows over time to accommodate it. And if the pituitary grows too large, it blocks the dopamine in the brain from doing its job, which is to inhibit the release of prolactin. Elevated prolactin levels cause the symptoms I’d experienced. They also can cause infertility and, left undetected, result in blindness.
The doctor said she didn’t think I’d had a good hit of dopamine in about three years. I began taking medication, and within a few weeks I felt better. The doctor said I should be my old self in about a year.
Oprah Winfrey tells a story about wanting to be in the film The Color Purple. After her audition, she tormented herself over whether she’d gotten the part. Months went by and she repeatedly called Steven Spielberg’s office to no avail. Finally, thinking she’d lost the role because of her weight, she checked herself into a fat farm.
She was running laps on the track one day when she realized she had to let the movie go or it was going to kill her. She began singing, “Lord, I surrender all to thee,” praying for God to lift the attachment from her heart. Finally she felt the burden lift. She had let it go.
A few moments later, a woman came running out to the track. “Oprah! Oprah!” the woman yelled. “Steven Spielberg is on the phone!” Of course, the rest is history.
My story goes a little something like that. The failure of my movie and my subsequent illness forced me to accept what is. My entire life had been spent desiring something outside of myself: success, fame, validation. Now I was being forced to accept things as they were. The kid who wrote of fame in her journal finally had grown up to realize she didn’t need fame to feel fulfilled.
As I sat on a rock at Great Falls this past autumn, I thought: I surrender. If all I ever am is a failed-writer-turned-Pilates-instructor, that’s OK. It’s enough. And for the first time, it was.
When I got back to my car, there was a voicemail from Tatiana Kelly. “The director who just won Best First Feature at the Toronto Film Festival read your script and wants to make the movie,” she said. “You need to come to L.A. right away. Call me!”
Laughing softly, I started the car and wended my way home.
Dominique Paul lives in Gaithersburg, where she is working on her second novel and teaching Pilates while she waits for her screenplay to finally make it to the big screen.
